Rubio aims to manage expectations

As Marco Rubio arrives in Washington in the coming week for Senate meetings and orientation, the hype is almost deafening.

The handsome, 39-year-old Florida senator-elect has graced the covers of National Review, The Weekly Standard, Time and The New York Times Magazine. He's been called "the Great Right Hope" and "the Republican Obama." Sen. Jim DeMint, Rubio's key early ally, recently predicted he'd be president within five years. Rubio's Wikipedia page already has a "Presidential Election 2012" section.

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No Republican in memory has come to Washington with such fanfare. And none has had so much riding on a successful Capitol Hill rollout.

His advisers helped draw up carefully calibrated post-election plans for Rubio, in which after his humble, gracious Nov. 4 speech thanking the voters of Florida, the senator-elect would go dark. To escape all the demands on his time, he would take off for the other side of the world. When he got back, he'd try to follow the Hillary Clinton playbook, winning respect on both sides of the aisle by keeping his head down and his nose to the grindstone.

But that's already proving close to impossible.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell requested that before leaving for Israel with his wife, Rubio tape the GOP's first post-election address. He could hardly say no — and now his Nov. 6 video has been viewed close to 34,000 times on YouTube. (The previous weekly address, by House Minority Leader John Boehner on Oct. 30, had been viewed 3,336 times as of Saturday evening.)

Once he left the country, it didn't get any easier. Nearly 300 media outlets from around the world had attended his election night party, according to The Miami Herald, so naturally the Israeli media wanted a piece of the GOP's rising star when he arrived. American networks begged to do satellite interviews via their Israeli bureaus. Rubio's people turned them all down.

The recent precedents for this kind of Senate stardom are both Democrats: Clinton and Barack Obama. Considering their trajectory, their examples don't lend much credence to Rubio's advisers' insistence that he wants nothing more than to be the best possible representative for Floridians of all persuasions, then return to his beloved home to live under the laws he's made.

"The best strategy, which is epitomized in Hillary Clinton, is just demonstrate that you're a workhorse, not a show horse," said Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Senate aide before his appointment to the seat vacated by Vice President Joe Biden. "Looking back over the senators who have come in with higher profiles, just about all of them have taken that approach."

Those who have instead sought to use the Senate as a platform for instant fame have generally been one-termers, he said.

Clinton sought to blunt the impression that she was a mere celebrity by working hard on unsexy, bipartisan initiatives, earning the respect of her colleagues and crafting an image of diligence.